Free The Corsican Caper by Peter Mayle

grinned, and gave them the thumbs-up before he and his delightful aunt hurried away through the crowd.
    On the drive back to Marseille, Elena dozed and Sam reviewed the progress they’d made. Not much, he had to admit. Not much at all.

Chapter Eleven

    Oleg Vronsky was not a happy man. The only thing he had learned from having Reboul’s car followed was that Reboul was aware of it, and more than capable of dealing with it. “So,” he said to Nikki, “the man’s not a fool, and he knows something is up. I don’t know how good his ferrets are, but there’s a chance they might find out that I’m involved. That would not please me.” Nikki, distracted from the magazine he had been reading,
Body Beautiful
, nodded sympathetically.
    They were on board
The Caspian Queen
, heading east down the coast toward Cap d’Antibes. Vronsky was to have lunch with Sergei Kalinin, an old friend from Moscow who had mysterious but clearly very lucrative connections with the ministry in charge of exploiting Russia’s natural gas. He, like several of his well-heeled compatriots, had decided thata large villa on Cap d’Antibes was in every way more attractive than a dacha in the dank and gloomy forests outside Moscow or even a palatial beach hut in Sochi. Better food, for one thing, and a wider choice of girls. It promised to be an amusing lunch.
    But it was unlikely to bring Vronsky any closer to owning Le Pharo, which, he had convinced himself, he
deserved
. He was one of the most successful men in the world, and among the richest. For years he had been able to have exactly what he wanted. And now, all that stood between him and his dream was that stubborn, arrogant, pain-in-the-ass Frenchman.
    Nikki had been with Vronsky long enough to have become an expert in reading his moods, and his boss’s growing frustration was increasingly obvious. Nikki too had become tired of the inactivity and lack of progress, and had even considered some extreme solutions of his own to the problem. Abduction? A car bomb? Lacing Reboul’s whisky with cyanide? But the difficulty, as he had been often reminded, was that Vronsky, once having taken possession of Le Pharo, intended to make it his base. He would be spending a great deal of time in Marseille, and attention from the local police would be most unwelcome. Scandal must be avoided. Whatever happened to Reboul must happen away from the city. But where? And what?

    The Caspian Queen
cut her engines and drifted to a halt a few hundred yards offshore. One of the Rivas was lowered and made ready for the short trip to the private jetty, where Kalinin, a barrel of a man wearing camouflage shorts, an I ♥ Putin T-shirt, and a yachting cap, was waiting to greet his guests.
    “Oli!”
    “Sergei! It’s been so long!”
    “Too long!”
    The two men hugged in the enthusiastic Russian manner, for all the world like two wrestlers, each searching for the opportunity to administer a lethal cross-buttock throw. And then, still grasping one another by the shoulders, they pulled back for the ritual exchange of insults.
    Vronsky to the portly Kalinin: “Oy!—I see the diet didn’t work.”
    Kalinin to the shorter Vronsky: “What’s this? You’ve given up wearing those high heels?”
    There was a flurry of back-slapping, Nikki was introduced, and the three men went up through a path lined with parasol pines to what Kalinin described as his “little country cottage.”
    In fact, it was a mansion, built in the 1930s, the stucco faded to the color of a dusty pink. “Once Nabokov was the only Russian living here,” said Kalinin. “Now we’re all over the place. Vladimir—remember him?—has a villa just upthe road, and the Oblomov boys are taking care of the house opposite. They’re coming to lunch. Vladimir has a sweet little operation in Nice—you should see his girls!—and the Oblomovs are getting cozy with the Corsican mafia. So it’s business as usual. Now, what are you having? I can recommend the